1Mentor Case Study - Fulfilling Students Agendas
Timeline - February 28th-April 8th of 2022
My Role - Project planning, decoding original feedback, in person/virtual interviews and implementing final design for 1Mentor for Springboard UX/UI Design Bootcamp
The Problem - Giving Students a Intuitive and Functional Platform
1Mentor is an upcoming product catered to helping prospecting students and educators alike to stay on track with their goals towards their education and careers. They would harness AI’s capabilities to narrow down roles for upcoming students, that would showcase skills to advance their journey.
They expressed frustration with their current design which my team and I would give our insights and validation to help improve their product overall. Overall, the design was clean and modern and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, yet most of their users expressed confusion of where to navigate within the platform.
This is where my team and I came in to help strengthen their product for launch day.
Tools I Used
Challenges to Success
To provide a simple and effortless way to make an account.
To have users track their career skills progression.
To organize design elements with designated colors on dashboard to be more intuitive.
The Solution - Collaborating with My Team to Address Design Misconceptions
Process
The First Round of User Testing Feedback:
The login was too lengthy.
The overall design was sleek and modern looking, but left a lot of room for misinterpretation with the elements shown.
Users could just skip if need be but it was felt to be wasteful if information captured was important.
Had confusing lingo.
Users didn’t know how to complete skills to achieve career goals.
There was a lot of misinterpretation with the occupations and skills section on the dashboard.
Addressing the Pain Points
The design choices my team and I had to address were:
To change the lingo so the user would opt to look at the occupations rather than change skills.
Remove the “Select” on the ghost squares.
To remove the excess slots to give the user more control of what to keep on their dashboard.
Have the “Explore Capabilities” to a separate sidebar.
To flesh out the users profile a bit more.
“There were a lot of steps, uh, would be great to like kind to cut down the number of steps as much as possible” - Participant A
Implementing Changes & Prototyping:
After meeting and debriefing what our roles were in the companies project, my team and I began to make changes with the design and prototype a new version for users to react to. We worked alongside the main developer through each decision and takeaway.
In-Person Interviews & Feedback On New Prototype:
Once we all came to a conclusion of what to implement design wise, we began to write a script to present to each user.
Overall, we received a lot of positive feedback and a sense of ease from the platform. My teammates and I all took turns reading off the script, and had 7 people to interview. We received little to no complaints about the new design and prototype we had made, which was very satisfying to hear after the first iteration displayed.
Once we gathered the feedback and synthesized it, we put together a list of a recommendations and shared it with the 1Mentor team.
Me presenting to one of our participants.
My Final Thoughts
Project Redesign Review:
My team and I presented our findings with the product owner and team of 1Mentor, which concluded receiving much praise and satisfaction towards what we accomplished during the 4 weeks working on the project.
It was a great experience to work alongside a real company with a kind and reliable team. I enjoyed working on an actual product that will soon be developed, that not only aids students like me, but inspires them on their journey to find a career that they not only excel at but enjoy wholeheartedly.
My thanks to my fellow designers, Charlie Beck and Carice Chan, for all of their help through this process, as well as Paul Balcazar and Esteban Veintimilla at 1Mentor for their guidance.